


Rudbeckia fulgida

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Flowers, Memories, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-20 00:07:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14883878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: He had gifted her corpses and strange footprints, unidentifiable sludge and mysterious lights in the night sky.  Of course he would give her flowers,





	Rudbeckia fulgida

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: S2, S11  
> A/N: I saw some really nice flowers.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

When she thinks of the early years of their partnership, so much of it is shadowed. Retracing her own footsteps feels like entering a gallery of Renaissance art, painstakingly detailed but overcast by the sfumato fog of time. Or maybe it really was always dark, always wreathed in mist. Maybe the only high-wattage bulbs were in their flashlights. She remembers the planes of Mulder’s face, wedges of dim and dusty gold and blue and red light hollowing his cheeks and his eyes and illuminating the paisley swirling over his ties. He looks, in her memory, like a stained glass window on a cloudy day. 

She remembers once, driving through Missouri. She’d thought at first it was the case in Aubrey, but that had been bleak unrelieved winter, as desaturated as the rest of her memories. This memory was breathless at the edges with summer heat. They should have been routed through Kansas City or St Louis on their way to wherever they were going, but they’d been booked to the airport in Springfield instead. The flight had been cramped and the little plane had seemed to jitter with every breeze, likely to shake itself apart. She had been up late the night before, talking on the phone with Missy, who checked in more often since her miraculous return, and after the teeth-gritting flight, she was irritated and unimpressed, sweating through her silk shell. She’d had to shed her jacket as soon as they’d stepped out of the airport. The air was a wet wool blanket draped over her. They were in the mountains, officially, but she’d seen mountains before. The Ozarks were rounded and stooped by comparison: steeper than hills, but they fit comfortably into the sky. Nothing to write home about, she thought. Mulder, poring over the atlas, had decided the backroads would be the best route. Of course he had. Mulder had heard that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line and dismissed it as a hypothesis too tenuous and mundane to bother with.

“You can’t learn anything about a place from the highway,” he’d said, and she’d just gazed out the window into the wildly green woods and adjusted the air vents to blow her damp hair back from her face. Every turn brought more of the same: trees tangled with brush, their leaves barely rustling, hunched over gloomy shadows that didn’t even manage to look any cooler than the rest of the woods. They seemed to be the only vehicle on the road. Maybe their car the only vehicle left in the world, she’d thought briefly and immediately dismissed; her mind was hyperbolic but still couldn’t keep up with experience, or with Mulder’s embrace of the extreme. She’d fallen asleep as he’d negotiated the shade-dappled curves of the state highway, two roughly-paved lanes and a speed limit of 45.

She woke up to the touch of Mulder’s warm fingertips on her chilled skin. “Scully, look,” he said, not withdrawing his hand. His palm fit easily over the round of her shoulder, she noticed, as she raised her head and saw the woods open up suddenly into a riot of wildflowers, red and orange and white. All along the edges of the road there were thousands of Black-eyed Susans or something like them, interrupted near the road by ridges of scarlet clover and overseen by nodding Queen Anne’s Lace. 

“Oh,” she’d said, pressing her own palm to the window. The heat of the day had pressed back through the safety glass. 

“I couldn’t let you miss it,” he’d said, and slipped her that Mulder smile. When he withdrew his hand, she felt cold, despite the sun beating in through the windshield. Whatever his failures, Mulder was generous to a fault when it came to sharing experiences. Of course he hadn’t let her miss the wildflowers fading out of sight behind them. He had gifted her corpses and strange footprints, unidentifiable sludge and mysterious lights in the night sky. Of course he would give her flowers, a splash of color as unexpected and defiant of easy explanation as any of the rest of their encounters. A clearing in the midst of otherwise untouched forest. Wildflowers that thrived in the sun but couldn’t grow under the canopy of the woods. An ordinary miracle, unasked and unhoped for. A moment she would have shared with no one else.

In her memory, the wildflowers have an almost unearthly radiance. They glow like a field of stars. She can almost smell their sweetness, though it’s just her brain filling in imagined sensation; the only scent in the car was from a nearly dried-out air freshener tucked into the cupholder. She wonders now what would have happened if they’d stopped, pulled off into the clover, smearing vermilion into the treads of the tires. They might have found the rubble of a homestead under the carpet of flowers, the stub of a chimney. Mulder might have tucked a flower behind her ear. She might have turned her lips into his palm, some expression of all the thanks she hadn’t been able to give for the way he’d kept looking for her when everyone else had given up. She might have drawn him down into the grass with her, despite the risk of ticks, the air already body-hot and sweaty so that taking off their clothes would have made no difference except all the difference in the world. She had been so alone then, so self-contained that even his hand on her shoulder had been a minor revelation. She had never found a way to ground herself against Mulder. Everything about him was live and crackling with energy. The beauty of the moment had struck through her like a shock, even insulated by the rubber and plastic of the car, by her frustration and weariness. She feels it still in her bones, the ache of his approach like a storm coming. Need flickers in her like lightning seen from miles away. The chance passed over cannot be redeemed. She knows that. But she makes her own opportunities these days, a queen rather than a pawn.

At the farmers’ market, she buys wildflower seeds from an enterprising group of preteen girls who have taken over a corner of the bakery booth. The seeds are packed into spheres of papier-mâché - a bomb, the girls call it. Maybe there’s still time to turn their unremarkable yard into a sea of color. Maybe there’s still time to throw caution to the wind, to surrender to the wild abandon of desire, to crush flower petals against their skin until they’re smeared with the brilliance of them, or even just to sit hand in hand savoring the glory of a world in which flowers still bloom.

Despite everything, flowers still bloom. They found their way out of the darkness. She lives in a world now where a bomb can be a thing of beauty. It isn’t nothing. The dark vaulted halls of her memory are not all shadow. Here and there, sunlight lances down, and she steps into the brilliance of it, and sees wildflowers. They will make more memories like this, more gilded scenes of ease, more sudden bursts of improbable flowers amid dark woods.

She sees him buying sausages from the local organic farm. She would recognize him anywhere, she thinks, in any timeline of any world. “Mulder,” she says, and he turns, his face brightening.

“What’d you buy?” he asks, nodding at her paper bag of flower bombs.

“A second chance,” she says, and takes his hand.

 


End file.
